https://amicalled.com/pastoral-lessons-from-mars-hill-church-e8-lessons-on-recovering-after-crisis/
What is more, Sutton Turner has published the transcript of episode 8
https://investyourgifts.com/recovering-after-crisis/
Ah, thanks! That sure beats Wenatchee The Hatchet having to spend a uncounted hours transcribing things like Mark Driscoll's 2008 spiritual warfare series before being able to do any analysis of it!
Excerpts from and thoughts/notes on Episode 8 are below:
about 4:25 through 10:00 ish
Sutton Turner:
And so, I’ve been to Panera Bread, up there in, what was that? Shoreline area, and met with many, many, many people before I left and came to Texas. Some people that I had never even met with before, or never even met before, having that meeting, and listened to their hurts, and owned as much as I could, and answered as many questions as I could. And so, the first step is listening and empathizing, and then praying, and allowing the Lord to reveal to you the things that you have sinned and that you need to own. That’s kind of like the second part. It’s learning what you did.
Sutton Turner:
Then the third part was, how can you… In your current position, how can you help others? It’s kind of what we’re doing here today, to learn from our mistakes, to learn from our sins, to not commit the same thing and do the same thing that we did. To avoid what happened at Mars Hill. And so, that’s the hard part. You know? I mean, what, we’re six years, and it’s still fresh like yesterday. And by the way, this is an ongoing… I mean, I’ve had meetings with somebody here this last month, that I hurt back in… Oh, gosh. What was that? 2012. So, that was like eight years ago. So I mean, this isn’t like a one shot thing and you’re done.
Sutton Turner:
Then lastly, I would say… And it’s hard, but you’re not going to reconcile with everyone. There’s some people, like Mark Driscoll, that won’t meet with me, and won’t reconcile. Blocks me from all social media. And I know that that might never… There might never be reconciliation there. I can’t worry about that. I give that up to the Lord. But I can reach out to every person I can. And there’s other people that have said that I have hurt them when we are at Mars Hill that won’t speak to me. It doesn’t mean that they won’t speak to me. It just means they’re not ready right now. And that’s okay. [emphasis added]
Sutton Turner:
And so, I think it’s a process. It’s a stinking hard process. But I think it’s a healing process for both people. It’s helped… I know this is going to sound weird, but it’s actually helpful to me, for me to be able to see my sin from a perspective of someone else. It makes me realize how bad I need Jesus, and how much I’m not Jesus, and how much I need Him, and how much I need the Holy Spirit, and how much I need to repent of my sins. So, it’s actually a process to me that draws me closer to Christ, and closer to the cross, and more dependent upon Him, and less reliant upon myself, when I see my own sin and the way that I have hurt others.
Sutton Turner:
And so, it’s hard. It’s not awesome. But I encourage people to do it, after you’ve walked through that. And it doesn’t mean that… If you’re a current pastor of a church, you can still go through the same process. You don’t have to wait until you leave the church, and then look back and try to… I mean, it can be an ongoing process. If you understand that we’re all sinners, and we fall short of Christ, and we all have the opportunity to repent of our sin, and we all have the opportunity to reconcile with our brothers and sisters and grow, I think it’s just that opportunity. So, you don’t have to wait until the end of your career or the end of your term at serving at that church or whatever.
Sutton Turner:
And so, I would just encourage the things that I wish I had done as a pastor, which was sitting down and listening to people, empathizing with them, learning from my mistakes, and then turning around and helping others learn from my mistakes. I wish I would have done that in 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, the whole time I was at Mars Hill Church. And so, I didn’t, and so my recommendation to everybody would be learn from me, and what I didn’t do during the time, and what I’m now trying to do. But do it now.Having listened to the roughly six hours of audio across eight episodes I have not met Sutton Turner in person but I get a sense that he is sincerely and seriously trying to become a new, different and better kind of person to have discussed his role in the abusive leadership culture of Mars Hill to the extent of having about six hours worth of for-the-record conversations about it. Things seem to be similarly the case for Bruskas who I admit I have also not met, although some former Mars Hill people and others have mixed thoughts about Bruskas that I don't intend to get into.
What's also of note in this episode is that Turner and Bruskas reminisce about how in their earlier years at Mars Hill, circa 2011 ish (though Bruskas came on board maybe as far back as 2009 if memory serves), they noticed blogs discussing Mars Hill by way of the treatment of Bent Meyer and Paul Petry (i.e. what I have regularly thought of as kangaroo courts).around 11:00 in the podcast
... it goes back to the early days, when I first got to Mars Hill. Pastor Dave and I were kind of learning… We kind of arrived on the scene at the same time as executive elders, and I started reading blog posts about Bent Meyers and Paul Petrie. And I remember Dave and I talking to the other executive elder, and said, “Hey, we really want to sit down and understand this, because gosh, there’s a lot of hurt there.” And it was clearly told to me that I could not. [emphasis added]
Sutton Turner:
And that took on the way that I handled criticism, and the way that I handled claims against me, or any disputes with me, is I avoided them and didn’t sit down with them, which is absolutely the wrong thing. When you’re sitting across the table from a brother or sister of Jesus Christ, and they communicate to you how they have been hurt… To me, that’s all you need. You need to be right there with that person, and immediately, I believe that the Holy Spirit convicts you of that sin, and allows you to empathize with that brother and sister. But if it’s all on email, and you never sit across the table from someone, I think that you can build up a fortress around you, an insulation around you, to where you don’t feel that. [emphasis added]
Sutton Turner:
But when you’re sitting right across the table… And right now, unfortunately, I live in Texas, so the people now, it’s on Zoom, but to me it’s still just as good as sitting across the table. But you’re on Zoom with somebody, hearing how you’ve hurt them and how they were affected, or how their family was affected by the ministry, or all of that, and there’s tears that come across. To me, it’s the listening and the being empathetic. That’s how you break, and that’s how it starts. And so, as soon as I started doing that, it just broke me and made me so aware of my sin, and then also made me so wanting to help others that I had hurt. So it kind of flipped the switch, if that makes sense.
Who the executive elders were circa 2011 is something we'd have to look up but post 2007 re-org Jamie Munson, Mark Driscoll, Bubba Jennings, Scott Thomas and at one point Tim Smith and Tim Beltz all come to mind as men who were at least possibly executive elders around the time Sutton Turner joined Mars Hill.
From about 13:30 to 17:30 is where Bruskas comments on his experience in the wake of the Mars Hill closure:
Dave Bruskas:
So, my experience was I was one of the last people fired by Mars Hill, on December 31st, 2014, the last day that Mars Hill existed as an entity. That’s kind of my pink slip day. And on January 4th, 2015, so just three days later, I was in the pulpit at North Church in Albuquerque, New Mexico. And so, my response was probably like it would be if I lost a close family member, and that is just get busy. Just get to work. Just put your head down and go, and the pain in time will minimize. And if you stay busy, you don’t have to sit around and think about it all day.
Dave Bruskas:
And so, in hindsight that was a big error, to just jump right in and force myself through things. And after about a year or two, I really began to see the effect of the death of Mars Hill. I happened to be… This is an embarrassing story, but my family had gone from Albuquerque to Texas on a Christmas break, and I had my wife and two of my daughters in the car with me. We were driving back home. It was the middle of a snowstorm. There are snowstorms, for people who aren’t familiar with New Mexico and Texas. My one daughter had a serious boyfriend in one of the towns on the way back, and she wanted to see him. And the snow drifts were so high, we couldn’t get into that town. And so, she was disappointed she couldn’t see her boyfriend. I was frustrated with all the pressure I was feeling, of trying to get the family home.
Dave Bruskas:
And man, I just lost it. I yelled. I went into a tirade. I did the whole, “Poor is me. You don’t know what it’s like to be a dad in a family. You don’t know what it’s like to carry the load. You don’t know what it’s like to disappoint the people that are counting on you.” And in the middle of that I realized, “This is not really about this experience. This is not really about what’s going on in this moment.” And my wife and my two daughters just looked stunned. They just looked at me with mouth wide open, like, “Man, you’ve lost it, Dad.” And I realized that there was something more going on, and it probably had to do with Mars Hill. It was very clear to my wife and kids, too. Like, “Hey, I need to talk to somebody about it.”
Dave Bruskas:
Reached out to a dear friend who is a counselor, and we began to process things. So for me it was like a death, in that as time as has passed, and where I’m at today, I feel sad. I genuinely feel sad, and I feel sad about a very specific thing. I feel sad about the relationships, and the opportunity that was lost. Mars Hill wasn’t all bad, and there were some amazing people there, and the Lord was doing some amazing work. And to think about the opportunity that we had to continue to do that together, with some of the people that I just loved dearly, as much as anybody on the face of the Earth… And now that those relationships are distant… I think they’re all reconciled, but we’re just not together in the same way we were before… that’s sad to me. And then, yeah. The opportunity we had to really further the Gospel in Seattle and beyond, is tough. It’s sad to think about the opportunity that was lost there.
Dave Bruskas:
It was a death in a different way, too. I feel like a part of me died there. And I’ll be real specific, too. Probably the part of me that genuinely gets rightfully excited about good things. It took me a while to be appropriately sad. It took me a while to weep for those who weep. I just felt deadpan in my emotions, and it’s probably just because I locked them up in a vault to try to protect myself. So, it took me a season. But that came back first, and now it’s beginning to come back, are some healthy feelings in a relationship. Okay. It’s okay, it’s really okay to be happy today, and some good things are going on in the lives of people. It’s good to rejoice. So, kind of the weep with those who weep is back. The rejoice with those who rejoice is coming back. It’s not entirely there. It’s still in process.
From around 20:30 to 23:00
Dave Bruskas:
I think the point that Sutton made was really helpful, and I don’t want to gloss over that. That is, in the early days, it was really easy for me to think that in a short order, Mark’s going to come to his senses. He’s going to feel broken over what happened, and he’s going to do some things to help make this situation better, make it right. And I just want to release him from that. I want to release that expectation. Not that it wouldn’t be a good thing. I think it would be a great thing. But if my well-being and my being whole is dependent upon what somebody else does, and the realm of what I think they should do, then I’m going to be in a helpless place. So, yeah. Just kind of where I’m at. [emphasis added]
Sutton Turner:
And Ryan, I just want to hit on what Pastor Dave was just saying, to emphasize that the people that I talk to… And I would include myself in that… yearn for the opportunity to speak to Mark, and to have some type of reconciling event with him. And that’s a deep desire, especially with the people that helped start the church back in the late ’90s, that I’ve met with and talked with. A lot of them had left the church in ’06, and so I never really met them, but since that time have. They have that deep, deep… And it’s something that, even though I have sat down and talked to them, they still have a hole that they want to have filled by that meeting with him.
Sutton Turner:
And I keep on trying to encourage them, just like Pastor Dave was saying. “That day is probably never going to happen, and you need to be okay with that [emphasis added], and let, and just… ” Dave used the word release. They need to be released of that, just to release that expectation. Let it go. I think it’s a freeing thing that people can participate in. I know it was hard for me, because so much of when I was at Mars Hill was trying to win his favor, and trying to do well, and trying to get a atta boy, and trying to prove myself, and all of those types of things that were… And I think a lot of people were swept up into that. And then just to be done with that, and to be over with that, and let that go. Like Pastor Dave said, just let it go, and I think you’re going to be free from that. [emphasis added]
Sutton Turner:
But I think it’s too, though, meeting with me and meeting with Pastor Dave, it’s the next best thing, kind of. And so, I’m okay with doing that. Sitting down with people and talking with them, and being the next best person to talk to. Because they can’t talk to Mark, so they talk to me, and that’s fine. I’ll stand in that, and try to help them as much as I can.
Sutton Turner:
And I’ll ask… You know, as it relates to me, when I got to San Antonio after Mars Hill, I had a whole bunch of junk that I needed to work through. I met with this… Our whole family did. And that’s the thing that I don’t think that many people realize, is that yes, I was affected, but my family was affected a lot more, especially when my two girls, that grew up in Mars Hill. And so, not only the healing process of me, but really, a Christian counselor that met with all of us individually. Because each one of our experiences, and each one of our hurts and loss was different, and needed to be worked through with a Christian counselor. And so, if there’s people out there that have never done that, and that are still hurting from some type of losing a church, whether it’s Mars Hill or any church, man, I would go to someone and let them help you work through these pains.
There are, of course, other things discussed in the podcast conversation but I won't be getting into all of those things.
What stands out, of course, is the confirmation Sutton Turner gave that Mark Driscoll won't talk to him or meet with him and has blocked him across social media. In Driscoll's recounting to Larry Osborn of how he tried meeting with people he mentioned:https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2018/05/a-larry-osborne-conversation-with-mark_20.html
...
43:05
So, if I had anything to do over again it would for certainly be governance and relationships, `cause sometimes as leaders we can be so much about the windshield and what's next and the opportunities we're not spending much time in the rear-view mirror on where we're vulnerable, and what things from the past and so far as policy, relationship and conflict that have not been tended to they can find themselves suddenly thrust into the future.
So, yeah, I would say those issues of governance and relationship and those become the pot in which the ministry grows and if the pot's not right eventually the plant's not healthy.
LO: The pot's a little more on the relational side as I think, for this group, we've all kinda worked through kinda governance issues. People who kinda followed your story know part of it is governance. but relationally, what'd you do differently if you had that moment again.
43:57
Driscoll: There's a lot. There is an interesting book, ah, called Necessary Enemies by Henry Cloud that I found particularly helpful and I think it's in chapter 7 he talks about three kinds of people. And you're a proverbs, wisdom kind of guy. He talks about wise, foolish and evil. And so he says that you treat different people differently and they will determine how they will be treated by their conduct or their character. So the WISE people, you give them more time, more energy, more access, more vulnerability because they'll be a gift to you and you give to them, they'll act upon it, and it'll increase their wisdom like proverbs says it should.
44:34
Then there's foolish people and you're always having the same conversation; they want to blame-shift and change the subject and argue and fight and get others involved and make a lot of drama. And with foolish people he said you LOVE them but, ultimately, it's consequences so that they'll hopefully move toward wisdom and get some course correction.
44:50
And then he says there's evil people. And evil people, he says, you know, what they need is lawyers, guns and money and that with evil people, if you treat an evil person the way you treat a wise person (you give them more time, more information, more access, more vulnerability) they're just going to use that to hurt and to harm you and your ministry and your family. And so sometimes what evil people do, they will get foolish people to then make demands on their behalf that they be treated as wise, and so, for me, it would be wanting to pursue, first of all, wisdom by God's grace and that's a lot of the wisdom literature
...
49:58
LO: So, what did you learn that could help us, because every one of us are gonna find ourselves to SOME degrees in those public attacks, the staff attacks, that kind of thing, navigating that kind of thing
50:10
Driscoll: um, I met with thirtysome former leaders that would be sort of in the unhappy, disgruntled, frustrated category and almost every single conversation post my-resignation and transition, it's almost like it was a script, and they said the same thing which, I don't know if they were processing together, it's just where it ended up. And it was, "I can't forgive you because you're not repentant."
And I'd say, "Well, I apologized" and I would give the dates that I apologized with them, one, on multiple occasions I said, "Did I ever do that again?"
"No, you didn't not but I can't forgive you because you've not repented."
I asked, "Well, what does repentance look like?"
50:54
And over and over and over it was repentance--forgiveness, rather--forgiveness is at the END of the process, not the beginning and then I will JUDGE you and I can't forgive you until you're repentant and that means that I kind of sit in a God seat, and I need to give it a lot of time, and I can't forgive you until I believe you have come to full repentance as I see it. [emphasis added]
51:18
And I would wholeheartedly disagree with that. That is actually one of the fundamental theological issues that we had ongoing conflict underneath the church. There were some books that came in, there was some teaching, and I taught AGAINST that, I said I believe that forgiveness in ANY relationship is at the FRONT. Good luck handing this [forgiveness last praxis] to a marital relationship. "I will not forgive you until I feel you are repentant and I've seen the signs of repentance over the course of X number of years and conditions."
Well, tell the couch, "hello." And, you know, it's gonna be a long, hard route.
51:49
And so I did a full year of Bible study on forgiveness and I found that almost every time that the Bible talks about forgiveness, unforgiveness or bitterness, in that same orbit it talks about the demonic. So Ephesians 4, "forgive one another, don't give the devil a foothold." Paul tells the Corinthians, "Satan will not outwit us because we're not unaware of his schemes." You mentioned Matthew 18 in your talk. The story of the jailor that he's in torment, and I believe that is demonic torment. I believe the jailor is probably Satan in Jesus' story.
52:22
The question is, once we are hurt--and there's a difference between hurt and harmed. It's important to note that--once we are hurt we can either choose bitterness or forgiveness. As soon as we choose bitterness what we've determined is we will live in a cell where we are demonically tormented because Satan and demons have never forgiven anyone; they're never forgiven of anything; and as soon as we say, "I do not do forgiveness" what we're saying is, "I DO do the demonic." And I believe that Satan and demons, that the foothold of all the demonic is in the realm of unforgiveness.
52:57
And so what happens then is, you're in a jail cell of bitterness and hurt--the worst day becomes your every day; you take the worst of your past into your future; and the question is, "Do THEY have the key by repenting or do YOU have the key by forgiving?" and I believe that the Bible is clear that we hold the key to get out of our own cell of demonic torment and bitterness and frustration and living with the unending loop of in our mind of the worst parts of our life
53:26
and so, honestly, for me it was a long Bible study with the family--we couldn't go to church for a long time so on Sunday mornings we'd do that as a family, and did a long Bible study on forgiveness--[I] needed my children to forgive me for things I'd said and done to contribute; we needed to forgive others for things they'd said and done to contribute; and I want to make sure there was not a root of bitterness in my heart or in my family because the Bible is clear in Hebrews that eventually that grows up to defile many and all it takes is bitterness in one heart to destroy an entire church
54:00
and so ('m not saying I'm particularly skilled at forgiving but) I just see that, that it IS demonic [unforgiveness], that it HARMS those who don't forgive, and it allows us to have empathy for those who are hurting and to pray that they would come to experience the kind of forgiveness that the Lord forgave them because those who are forgiven are to be forgiving and when we STOP that flow I believe we stop the flow of the Holy Spirit in our life and I believe we stop the flow of the Holy Spirit in our relationships. [emphasis added]
Driscoll's account is that people were not willing to forgive him because they believed he had not shown the signs of repentance. Well, who had taught the people of Mars Hill at every level of leadership what repentance was supposed to look like so as to give them a way to assess whether or not someone like Mark Driscoll had repented? Wouldn't that have been Mark Driscoll, among others? What about Mark Driscoll recounting about ten years of bitterness in his marriage to Grace about issues like the quality and frequency of sex? Could not Mark Driscoll have, within his own way of defining the demonic, opened himself up to demonic influence? Around 2006 Driscoll wrote "Of Brokenness and Buddies" where he mentioned getting three hours of sleep a night. Someone charitably said that such a workload was insane.
For anyone who read that entire essay there's mention of chronic sleep deprivation but not necessarily any indication that he sought help for having one or more sleeping disorders. He tried taking sleeping pills to no avail. Well, depending on the kind of sleeping problem(s) he had pills can't help if there's some other problem. More to the point, anyone who has studied the history of, say, torture techniques used by the Soviets and the United States in the last eighty years will know that people who are deprived of enough sleep can crack, and crack terribly. The possibility that Driscoll had a meltdown in terms of both physical and mental health can't be ruled out in light of the diverse symptoms he has repeatedly recounted such as heavy caffeine use, acid reflux, sleep deprivation, adrenal fatigue (whether that's really a clinical category is up for debate I don't plan to have here); this year Driscoll told Carey Nieuwhof he has seasonal affective disorder but he's happier and healthier than he's ever been.
Which sounds, alas, just like what he was telling people at Mars Hill in 2007 after the firings of Meyer and Petry. He was the happiest and healthiest he'd ever been and he was very happy in his marriage. The story of how it was actually otherwise would wait until the early 2012 bestseller via ResultSource book Real Marriage.
What we can observe in Mark Driscoll's conversation with Osborn is a man who seems to really believe he did not say or do anything that would disqualify him from ministry, let alone raise doubts as to the veracity of his calling anecdote or even more basic questions about the extent and nature of his Christian conversion (there are, suffice it merely to say, some people who are not sure Mark Driscoll ever actually had a conversion experience to Christianity or he might not have thought to say that if he wasn't a preacher at a place like Mars Hill would he even be a Christian?" If you wonder about that:
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2016/02/mark-driscolls-old-christians-gone-wild.html
http://download.marshill.com/files/2006/06/18/20060618_resisting-idols-like-jesus_en_transcript.pdf.
RESISTING IDOLS LIKE JESUS
Part 22 of 1st Corinthians
Pastor Mark Driscoll | 1 Corinthians 10:1-14 | June 18, 2006
...
Here’s the tricky part: Figuring out what your idols are. Let me give you an example. Let’s say for example, you define for yourself a little Hell. For you, Hell is being poor. For you, your definition of Hell is being ugly. For you, your definition of Hell is being fat. For you, your definition of Hell is being unloved. For you, your definition of Hell is being unappreciated. That fear of that Hell then compels you to choose for yourself a false savior god to save you from that Hell. And then you worship that false savior god in an effort to save yourself from your self-described Hell. So, some of you are single. Many of you are unmarried. For you, Hell is being unmarried and your savior will be a spouse. And so you keep looking for someone to worship, to give yourself to so that they will save you. For some of you, you are lonely and your Hell is loneliness, and so you choose for yourself a savior, a friend, a group of friends or a pet because you’ve tried the friends and they’re not dependable. And you worship that pet. You worship that friend. You worship that group of friends. You will do anything for them because they are your functional savior, saving you from your Hell. That is, by definition, idolatry. It is having created people and created things in the place of the creator God for ultimate allegiance, value and worth.
So here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to get incredibly personal. This will get painfully uncomfortable if I do my job well. I’m going to ask you some probing questions. We’re going to try to get to the root of your idols and mine and I am guilty. I was sitting at breakfast this morning. My wife said, “So what is your idol?” I was like, “Hey, I’m eating breakfast! Leave me alone. I don’t want to talk about that.” I’m the pastor. I preach. I don’t get preached at. Eating bacon. Don’t ruin it. You know, it’s going good., And I told her, I said, “Honey, I think for me, my idol is victory.” Man, I am an old jock. More old than jock, lately, but I – I’m a guy who is highly competitive. Every year, I want the church to grow. I want my knowledge to grow. I want my influence to grow. I want our staff to grow. I want our church plants to grow. I want everything – because I want to win. I don’t want to just be where I’m at. I don’t want anything to be where it’s at. And so for me it is success and drivenness and it is productivity and it is victory that drives me constantly. I – that’s my own little idol and it works well in a church because no one would ever yell at you for being a Christian who produces results. So I found the perfect place to hide.
And I was thinking about it this week. What if the church stopped growing? What if we shrunk? What if everything fell apart? What if half the staff left? Would I still worship Jesus or would I be a total despairing mess? I don’t know. By God’s grace, I won’t have to find out, but you never know. [emphases added] So we’re going to look for your idols, too. Some questions. Think about it. Be honest with me. What are you most afraid of? What is your greatest fear? See, that probably tells you what your idol is. Sometimes your idol is the thing that you’re scared of not having, not being, not doing. What are you scared of? You scared that you’ll be alone? Are you scared that no one will ever love you? Are you scared that you will be found out that you’re not all that smart? Are you scared that you’ll be stuck in the same dead-end job forever? What are you afraid of?
Mars Hill had a castrophic decline from 2012 to 2014. Ryan Williams introduced each of the eight episodes by pointing out that from its peak to its death was about 24 months. Mark Driscoll's resignation from ministry and membership at Mars Hill Church made it a certainty that the church closed is doors as a corporate entity.
What is striking in listening to the roughly six hours of audio Williams, Turner and Bruskas have provided is Turner mentioning that in 2015 he was emailed and sent letters by Mars Hill counsel telling him not to disclose Global numbers. Turner recounted that even in death Mars Hill wanted secrecy and to avoid transparency, something that seems to have given Turner a shock, a realization of just how corrupt the church really was. Turner didn't name names but anyone who has closely tracked the life and death of Mars Hill feels obliged to ask, who were these attorneys that were representing Mars Hill during it's corporate death? Kerry Dodd oversaw the formal dissolution of Mars Hill as a corporate entity. Caleb Walters was the Chief Operating Officer during the dissolution period. There's another post if you're curious on Walters, what little there is about him.
We may never know who sent letters and emails to Turner telling him not to disclose the Mars Hill Global numbers but Turner's got a point through the eight episodes, that it does tell us something, and not a good something, that even in its death Mars Hill was a church committed to secrecy rather than transparency about money and where it went. Turner has talked at some length about having been part of that culture of abuse and financial secrecy. Whether other former executive elders besides Bruskas and Turner will talk about their roles in the former church's leadership culture is an open-ended question. Jamie Munson now seems to avoid mentioning that he was president of Mars Hill for years and an executive elder for some time. He is also not likely to discuss Result Source or the kangaroo courts of Petry and Meyer.
That Turner and Bruskas have been willing to share six hours of conversation on the record in the hope that people can learn what not to do through what they admit to having done may seem too late and too incomplete but to compare what they have been willing to say about their complicity in a church culture that Paul Tripp described as the most abusive church ministry culture he had ever seen to Mark Driscoll's post-Mars Hill resignation accounts about how rough he and his family had it, my own opinion, not that anyone has to care about it, is that Turner and Bruskas sound like they are starting to admit to and get that they were part of an abusive church at its top level of leadership, while Driscoll has avoided even mentioning Mars Hill by name.
As I was not personally harmed by either Turner or Bruskas I've never felt a need to meet with either of them. What I wanted was for the leadership culture to reform, if that was possible, and my prayer was that if the Mars Hill leadership would not reform and repent that God would providentially destroy the church as a corporate entity. Back in 2009 when I left Mars Hill (which was a slow roughly 20 month process I won't get into) I shared with a pastor friend that I loved the people of Mars Hill but was opposed to Mars Hill the principality, which was what I believed Mars Hill had become. The principality needed to reform or die and die it most assuredly did, and what's most remarkable is that Mars Hill Church died through its last two years as controversies escalated and Mark Driscoll decided to resign. To be clear, Mark Driscoll decided to resign rather than continue in the restoration plan in which he would be allowed to preach but not be in management (according to Justin Dean), a detail that did not come up when he told Brian Houton in 2015 he had actually agreed to the board's restoration plan. For what at one point were six available accounts of Mark Driscoll's resignation there's a post to read.
If there is a moment that seems to prove Sutton Turner and Dave Bruskas right in saying there was a double standard at Mars Hill where executive elders exempted themselves from ever having to live by the standards of transparency and repentance they wanted from others below them Mark Driscoll gave that account when he talked with Brian Houston about how and why he claimed in 2015 that God released him from ministry, not back in 2014 when he said he sought godly counsel and decided to quit--no, Driscoll waited until the year after he quit to say God told him to.
Here in 2020 that two of three late era Mars Hill executive elders now agree with Paul Trip's withering assessment of its abusive nature, the question that inevitably lingers is why Mark Driscoll seems unable or unwilling to admit the same.
POSTSCRIPT 5-31-2020
Long ago, twenty years ago about, Mark Driscoll once told a bunch of men in the Dead Men setting that should he ever go off the rails one day that what we should all do is leave. Leave many of us did, but whether Mark had by the time so many of us left understood what that meant now seems doubtful. Turner and Bruskas weren't at Mars Hill circa 2000-2001 when this admonition was given to us but it sounds like they met enough people from the earlier days to get a sense that the betrayal of Mark-as-brand was more acute for those of us who remembered how inveighed against the "God Box" mentality of denominations and saw Mars Hill become a God Box, a matter that Bruskas and Turner have been able to recount in conversation with Ryan Williams.
Yet at another level, a level that perhaps no one who was part of Mars Hill may be able to easily understand, that so many left may serve as a kind of reminder and judgment that long ago Mark told us that if he went off the rails to leave; we left (many of us); and he left In the past I alluded to what I referred to as Obadiahs in the court of Ahab--whatever Mars Hill had become as a corporate entity, the people were still brothers and sisters in Christ and there was a period from about 2011-2012 during which people who were still part of Mars Hill did more to help me in a difficult time than Mars Hill critics ever did. That was not lost on me. That Mark had lost his way and become everything he used to rail against does not mean the rest of us did.
Something Jessica Johnson said at her Elliot Bay Book Company reading has come back to me, when audience member after audience member asked how anyone could have fallen for Mark's line (i.e. how could Seattleites be dumb enough to fall for a religious teacher) Johnson paused a moment to say that Seattleites need to be less sure of themselves; that in a city that has a cult of Starbucks and a cult of Amazon and a cult of Microsoft and a cult of Boeing that the kind of corporate cultural landscape Seattle has nurtured for generations with its tech-savvy landscape meant that Seattle was possibly the only place in which a Mars Hill could have emerged in the way that it did. She also shared that she met and spoke with many people from Mars Hill whom she found thoughtful, intelligent, passionate, and concerned people.
It's something that may only make sense to people who were part of it over twenty years but the misuse of good made the evil as evil as it was. The friendship, community and fellowship could be very close which is why when it was turned to shunning and punitive discipline it became so harmful. To build a community that thinks in terms of positive legacy can be a good thing but the "we" that was so much the early Mars Hill community transformed from about 2009 to its end into a "my" legacy of a man who increasingly defined the "our" story in terms of himself and those willing to sign on, a la God's Work, Our Witness. It might be a bit much to ask that a history of Mars Hill that Mike Gunn and Cedric Bryant were on the founding board of directors, for instance (Cedric Bryant? Who was that?).
One of the shortcomings of coverage and discussions about Mars Hill is that by focusing almost entirely on the leadership and generally the political theological implications imputed to or found in Mars Hill; or the debates regarding ecclesiology and other doctrines that Mars Hill's existence catalyzed; the flesh and blood social life of the people doesn't come up. As Turner and Bruskas admitted about themselves as executive elders, there were a lot of levels of community, accountability, friendship and support that they could observe really existed at the community group level and campus level that didn't exist in the executive level as they experienced it.
To put this in more positive ways, thousands upon thousands of people who chose to leave chose to leave because they observed the disconnect between the fellowship below and the Marketing from above. I can recall how there were folks at the short-lived Lake City Campus and I was part of that campus before I felt obliged to leave and that campus was a great experience for me. I even left with the blessing and friendship of my campus pastor. I didn't burn bridges on my way out. As may have vexed leaders from time to time, the wealth and variety of information I got from sources had to have come from inside Mars Hill. Mark may have said that they got hacked in 2014 but it's more likely that people who felt powerless to talk to Mark shared what they could with outsiders who they could trust would bring things to light. Mark might have thought of that as betrayal but other Christians did and do think of that kind of dissent as a kind of faithfulness. We did not forget what we hoped Mars Hill could be, Mark did. Time and change and lockdown has meant separation but there are friends I made at Mars Hill with whom I am still friends I would love to spend time with again when circumstances allow. It was the abuse of many things that were beautiful and good that made the evil as evil as it was and as I've had some time to think about what Turner and Bruskas have shared a bit in comparison to and in contrast with the Mars Hill I once called home, that seems like something worth sharing. It's a shame, in a way, that Turner and Bruskas never had a chance to know the kind of community Mars Hill was before it became about Mark's brand but a secondary good is still that in comparison to the incomparably greater good of Christ, who has not forsaken us however often we may forsake Him.
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